Starbucks faces fight to restore UK reputation

AFP, LONDON

Despite pledging to pay millions of pounds in extra tax in Britain, Starbucks Corp faces a battle to restore its reputation over its fiscal stance, with analysts saying the offer is “too little too late.”

With 760 Starbucks outlets in the UK, coffee lovers need not travel far to find the familiar green signage

However, surveys suggest British consumers may be losing appetite for the US chain following the revelation last year that it has paid just ￡8.6 million (US$13.8 million) in corporation tax since 1998, despite generating ￡3 billion in revenues.

Under the weight of pressure from lawmakers and consumers, the company pledged in December last year to pay an additional ￡20 million in corporation tax over two years.

However, Sarah Murphy, director of market researchers YouGov BrandIndex, said the offer “has done little to slow down negative sentiment surrounding the brand.”

BrandIndex has tracked public perception of the coffee giant over several months. Its “Buzz” index gives companies a score based on what people have been hearing about the brand, with zero representing equal levels of positive and negative.

In early October last year Starbucks’ Buzz score stood at “+1.9,” but this plummeted to “-28.4” following the tax headlines, and reached “-45.2” in mid-December.

“That was quite a significant decline,” Murphy said, adding that measures of perceptions of Starbucks’ quality and value also sank during that time.

In November last year, the UK Public Accounts Committee grilled top executives from Google Inc, Amazon.com Inc and Starbucks over their tax affairs.

The apparent peak in negativity surrounding Starbucks in December came after the committee’s chairwoman Margaret Hodge slammed companies involved in tax avoidance schemes as “totally immoral.”

Since then, Murphy says the brand “does seem to be making a slow recovery”, but that the company “did too little too late.”

Social media agency Yomego identified similar patterns. It tracked online conversations over the same period and found negative comments about Starbucks increasingly outweighed positive.

Some 95 percent of comments on Starbucks UK’s Facebook and Twitter pages made reference to tax evasion, analysts said.

“The outrage over tax avoidance can’t help but have an impact on a company’s reputation in social channels. The old adage that ‘bad news travels fast’ has never been more true. Now news has so many channels to travel through, with the potential to multiply as people comment on and share stories,” Yomego managing director Steve Richards said